The first time I saw Bud Poile, he was a forward and head coach of the Edmonton Flyers in the Western Hockey League, twin jobs he handled for the last two-plus seasons of his playing career. His brother Don was on the team and I recall regularly mixing them up. […]
Bob Dunn – Distant Replay
How being in the sports media gave one writer & broadcaster the opportunity to interview sports personalities he never imagined he’d even meet in places he never imagined he’d be. These will be his stories about their stories — or just about them — from the pages of his past, while working out of Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver in the 60s and 70s.
Five times, he scored 30 goals in the National Hockey League. He had back-to-back 100-point seasons. An All-Star, he played for Team Canada in 1972’s Summit Series, scoring a key shorthanded goal on Vladislav Tretiak in Canada’s first win. He’s one of seven who also played in 1976’s Canada Cup, […]
By my count, there have been 17 different match-ups playing for whatever it is they play for at the National Hockey League All-Star Game, this week in the city self-proclaimed to be the heart of hockey, Toronto. There have been ties games, overtime games, and shootouts. They’ve played All-Stars against […]
A sports icon, soon to turn 70, is on life support. It happens. Life’s expiry dates and terminal diseases are unpredictable, often arriving when least expected. However, did anybody really see the demise of Sports Illustrated coming? At birth, SI was unique. A weekly sports magazine, it was the younger […]
Even I’m not old enough to be able to tell you what a great athlete Red Storey was, even if we were once fellow “inmates” at a Quebec penitentiary (relax, it was for an awards dinner). I am old enough to know that an athlete of his stature, a referee […]
Subjectivity and controversy often are teammates in decorating the heroes of sports. Sometimes, controversy goes beyond a ballot box, as it has with Baseball Hall of Famer Andre Dawson. The best centre fielder the Montreal Expos ever had was deservedly elected to the Hall of Fame in 2010. The top […]
The first time a hockey game reached into my chest and captured my heart was Canada versus Russia. No, not that one, although there are also many people who can share my emotions from one powerful night in Winnipeg. It was 1967, the finale of a six-day tournament that launched […]
A photo taken 75 years ago of two baseball players is now regarded as “a signature moment in the integration of baseball.” It might come as a surprise that Jackie Robinson was not in the picture. Two players, cheek to cheek. Two players, smiling and celebrating the joy of victory […]
In what seems like a couple of hundred sports years ago, Pete Rose announced he loved baseball so much he’d play for nothing. A short time later, he held out for $200,000 a season. And now Shohei Ohtani is going to be paid what the late Jimmy Buffett would’ve called […]
Tiger Woods has been a “distant replay” for quite a while now and that’s not really expected to change. He turns 48 this month. To escape being the Distant Replay he now is on these pages, Tiger would have to win his 16th major. His 15th was almost five years […]
It’s safe to say the first time I went to Winter Meetings — yes, it’s capitalized — as baseball’s newsmaker that bridges the World Series and spring training, it was a far cry from next week’s annual gathering in Nashville. There was no mystery then about whether the Toronto Blue […]
On my first sports beat, the first superstar-to-be I wrote about was Bobby Clarke. He was a junior hockey legend and there was much speculation where he would go in the National Hockey League team. Discussions extended after work. One included a newspaper colleague and his wife who — like […]
